Wesleyan University

The Other Confessional History: On Secular Bias in the Study of Religion

Author(s): Brad S. Gregory
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 45, No. 4, Theme Issue 45: Religion and History (Dec., 2006),
pp. 132-149
Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
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History and Theory,ThemeIssue 45 (December 2006), 132-149 CWesleyan University 2006 ISSN: 0018-2656

THE OTHERCONFESSIONALHISTORY:ON SECULAR BIAS

IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION

BRADS. GREGORY

ABSTRACT

The rejection of confessional commitments in the study of religion in favor of social-

scientific or humanistic theories of religion has produced not unbiased accounts, but
reductionistexplanations of religious belief and practice with embedded secular biases
that preclude the understandingof religious believer-practitioners.These biases derive
from assumptionsof undemonstrable,dogmatic, metaphysicalnaturalismor its functional
equivalent, an epistemological skepticism about all truth claims of revealed religions.
Because such assumptionsare so widespread among scholars today, they are not often
explicitly articulated.They were overtly asserted by Emile Durkheimin his Elementary
Forms of ReligiousLife (1912), however,andareimplicitin the claims of two otherthinkers
influentialin the studyof early modem Christianityin recentyears, namely CliffordGeertz
and Michel Foucault. The use of such theories in the history of religion yields secular
confessional history,parallelto traditionalreligiousconfessionalhistoryonly with different
embeddedmetaphysicalbeliefs. If scholarswant to understandreligious persons such that
the latterwould recognize themselves in what is said aboutthem, ratherthan impose their
own metaphysical convictions on them, then they should reject metaphysically biased
reductionisttheories of religion no less than confessional religious assumptions in the
practiceof their scholarship.Instead,a study of religion guided not by theories but by the
question,"Whatdid it meanto them?"andwhich is particularizedin metaphysicallyneutral
ways offers a thirdalternativethat avoids confessionalhistory,whetherreligious or secular.
When carried out consistently for multiple traditions,such an approachcan reconstruct
disagreementsthatpoint beyond descriptionto historicalexplanationof change over time.

I will begin with a story.' In graduate school I was having lunch with two friends,
fellow graduate students. We had gotten our food in a crowded cafeteria and were
headed to find a table when one of them spilled his drink on the floor. Immediately,
the other student grabbed a handful of napkins, got down on his knees, and started
cleaning up the mess. "Thanks a lot," said the first student, "your commitment to
the social contract really amazes me." "You're welcome," said the second, "but
I'm amazed by your secular interpretation of my imitatio Christi."
This incident illustrates how a given human action can be interpreted in
radically different ways. More specifically, it shows that behavior enacted within a

1. Earlierversionsof thispaperwerepresentedas the SnowdonLecturein the Studyof Religion

at WesleyanUniversityin 2002, as a ForumLectureat BrighamYoungUniversityin 2004, andat
the conferenceon ReligionandHistoryat WesleyanUniversityin 2005.Amongthosewhooffered
helpfulsuggestionson thoseversions,I amespeciallygratefulto RobertSullivan,JimTurner,Gary
Shaw,andCraigHarline.

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 THE OTHERCONFESSIONALHISTORY 133

religious frameof reference,but not bearingany overtly religious character,might

be viewed in secular terms. Nor would such a reading be obviously erroneous;
helping someone in need might indeed be done out of respect for social contract
ideals, from simple humandecency, in orderto make oneself appearvirtuous,or
for any numberof otherreasonsor combinationof reasons.Yet in this case, unless
we have groundsto doubt the veracity of the studentwho helped to mop up the
mess, we know that such interpretations,although consistent with the evidence,
would be mistaken. The student, who was a believing and practicing Christian,
told us how he understoodwhat he had done, and at least implicitly, what had
motivated him. It had nothing to do with commitment to the social contract.
His frame of reference was not secular political attitudesor values but religious
conviction, his language closer to Thomas 'i Kempis than to Rousseau. This
incident suggests an importantlesson: an action thatmight look non-religiousand
thatcould be interpretedplausibly in seculartermsmight have been motivatedby
and understoodby its protagonistin religious terms.
Now for a second story,like the firstdirectlyrelatedto the subjectof this essay.
I began my first year of college at Utah State University in Logan, Utah, as a
Midwesternoutsider who knew little about Mormonismor the Churchof Jesus
Christof LatterDay Saints. I had never before met a memberof the LDS Church.
In northernUtah I found myself regarded as a member of a "gentile" (that is,
non-LDS) minority within a dominantand alien religious culture. Struggling to
make sense of that culture and its people, I found that the more I comprehended
LDS teachings-what the doctrines actually were and implied-the more
incomprehensibledid it seem that people actually believed and lived by them.2
As an undergraduate,I entertainedany numberof explanationsfor why Mormons
believed and lived as they did, ranging from the dismissive and disparaging
(they're crazy, brainwashed, uncritical, sheltered, ignorant) to the more
sophisticated(they're habituatedfrom youth, a strong sense of communitykeeps
them in the fold, they fear the social consequences of rejecting their religion).
The more sophisticatedexplanationsor combinationsof explanations--to which
otherscould be added,based on social-scientificor culturaltheories of religion-
generally satisfied me. They were plausible, they producedcredible accounts of
the data, and they elucidated to my satisfaction what Mormonism was, how it
functioned,and why Mormonsdid what they did.
But there was a nagging problem.However satisfactorymy explanationswere
to me, or to others who sharedmy assumptions,those explanationsfailed to help
me understandthe members of the LDS Church any better,just as reference to
the social contractfailed to supply a correct interpretationof my friend's action
in wiping up the spilled drink.In fact, because such explanationsare inherently

2. James Boyd White has said that, "it seems to be a characteristicof the side of life we call reli-
gious thatat a deep level it makes no sense at all to those outside the religion in question.The religious
stories and myths of anotherpeople are to us inherentlyand permanentlyincredible."White, "How
Should We Talk about Religion? Inwardness,Particularity,and Translation,"Occasional Papers of
the ErasmusInstitute(Notre Dame, IN: ErasmusInstitute,2001), 7-8. This describes the situationfor
those who remainoutside the religion in question, but it cannot be the whole story, or else one could
not accountfor religious conversionsto beliefs that lost theirhithertoincrediblecharacterand became
believable to a given person.

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134 BRAD S. GREGORY

reductionist,in the literal sense of reducing religion to something else, they led
away from any sense of what Mormon experience, beliefs, and behaviors were
like. As the colloquial phrase goes, I did not "get" Mormons, not despite but
because of my explanations, since all of them implied that Mormonism is not
what Mormonstake it to be. It became apparentthat if I wanted to "get"them, if
I wantedto understandMormonsratherthanto reduce theirreligion to something
else-that is, if, as an outsider,I wanted to grasp as nearly as possible how they
saw the world, why they did what they did, how their beliefs impinged on their
social lives, political preferences,and culturalengagements--then there was no
choice but to set aside what made sense to me and to endeavor to comprehend
the relationshipbetween their religious beliefs and their lives. It goes without
saying thatvariationsdistinguishlocal communitiesandindividualsin a thousand
and one ways. One cannot deduce specific behavior or beliefs from official
ecclesiastical pronouncements;not all LDS men and women believe and behave
identically; Logan is not Salt Lake City or Moab; and so forth. But whatever
social influences or culturalfactors affect individualmembersof the LDS Church
in theirrespective local communities,on the whole they believe what they believe
and do what they do because they regardMormonismas the one, truecontinuation
and fulfillmentof Christianity,revealed by God to his churchthrougha series of
latter-dayprophetsbeginning with Joseph Smith in upstateNew Yorkin the early
nineteenthcentury.According to them, the LDS Churchoffers the true, divinely
revealedview of reality with respect to humanorigins, meaning,values, purpose,
and destiny. Conversely, not to believe this, at least in substance, is to cease to
be a Mormon.This insight aboutLDS convictions--not recourseto sociological,
anthropological,or some other sort of theory--is the key to understandingthem,
as distinct from reductionisticallyexplainingthem.
ContemporaryUtah Mormonismis not Reformation-eraChristianity,my field
of professional expertise. Nor does one's individual experience suffice for the
historianwho seeks to "know the religious belief of the past in ways that might
have been recognisable to the people concerned," as Robert Scribner put it.3
Nevertheless,my Utahexperienceharborsimportantlessons not only for the study
of contemporaryAmericanMormonismor early modernChristianitybut, mutatis
mutandis,for the study of various religious traditionsin other eras and contexts
as well. First, there is a fundamentaldistinction to be made between attempting
to understanda given religion on the terms of those who believe and practiceit,
and attemptingto explain thatreligion (or religion in general)in terms thatreduce
it entirelyto somethingelse.4These are two radicallydifferentendeavors.In fact,
the expression to "lose one's faith" often means to accept as an explanationof
religion what one previously, as a believer, regarded(and rejected) merely as a
purported explanation.5Second, to recognize the religious basis of someone's
3. Bob Scribner,"Introduction"to Popular Religion in Germanyand CentralEurope, 1400-1800,
ed. Robert Scribnerand TrevorJohnson (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), 15.
4. I am indebted to Wilhelm Dilthey's distinction between understandingand explanation,
although I use these terms to denote two different approachesto the study of religion. For Dilthey,
Verstehenwas the mode of intellection of the humansciences (Geisteswissenschaften),Erkliirungthe
mode of the naturalsciences (Naturwissenschaften).
5. A colleague of mine, for example, explains his undergraduateconversion to and subsequent

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 THE OTHERCONFESSIONALHISTORY 135

worldview or actions bears not at all on the truth or falsehood of any religious
claims. Mormonismmight be entirely mistaken, and yet it is simply empirically
accurateto say that Mormonsbelieve it to be true and endeavorto lead their lives
accordingly.6WhetherLDS claims- or those of any otherreligious tradition- are
trueor false is entirelyirrelevantto the issue of whethercertainpeople believe and
are motivated by them. The careful attemptto understandas nearly as possible
and to represent fairly the religion of a given person, community, or tradition
has too often been wrongly conflated with questions about whetherthe religious
claims in question are true or not. But the ontological status of religion and the
epistemologicalstatusof religioustruthclaims have no bearingon a determination
of what religion means to its practitioners,and how it is relatedto their lives.
All this might seem trivial, little more than an assertion that religious
believers believe what they believe, that their beliefs influence their lives, and
that understandingreligious people requires one to acknowledge these things.
Yet the implications of such claims are less banal than they might seem, and run
deeply counter to the dominantways in which many historiansof early modem
Christianity,as well as many scholarsof religion in general,have tended in recent
decades to approachtheir subject matter.By and large, the impetus has been to
explain religion on the basis of reductionisttheories, not to understandit on the
terms of its believer-practitioners.
TraditionalChristian church history, known as confessional history for its
assumptionof particularclaims aboutthe truthof this or that Christianconfession
(for example, Lutheran,Catholic,Mennonite),has in recentdecadesbeen rejected
by most professional historiansbecause of its biases for and against particular
traditions. The analyses of confessional history are skewed by substantive,
frequently anachronisticreligious claims; or to put it in the terms used above,
even at its best, confessional history often privileges and seeks sympathetically
to understanda given traditionat the expense of explaining others in reductionist
terms.' I concur with this criticism, and so reject traditionalconfessional history
as an approachto religious people in the past. It is particularlyobjectionablein a
field such as early modem Christianity,which witnessed the formationof distinct,
divisive, and competing Christiantraditionsthat themselves engenderedmodem

rejectionof Christianityin Freudianterms, attributingit to unresolved issues with his fatherin early
adulthood.A Christianmight say that he lost his faith in God and adoptedinstead an explanationof
his experience based on faith in Freud.
6. Scholars who think that religious beliefs actually do not make claims about reality, even
that religious believers tout court do not regard their own beliefs in this way, are quite mistaken.
According to art historian Joseph Koerner, for example, following Dan Sperber, in religion "the
objects of belief are not facts about the world but representations.Believers believe in the author-
ity of statements,ratherthan in what the statementssay, as measured,for example, by experience"
(Koerner,TheReformationof the Image [Chicago:Universityof Chicago Press, 2004], 233-234). One
corrective to errors of this sort might be to spend some time among religious believers ratherthan
simply to theorize about them.
7. For a classic example of a Catholic confessional accountof the English Reformation,see Philip
Hughes, The Reformationin England, 3 vols. (London: Hollis and Carter, 1950-1954); for a clas-
sic Protestantconfessional account, see A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation,2nd ed. [1964]
(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991). An important,watershed article
critical of the shortcomingsof traditionalCatholic confessional history is Eric Cochrane, "Whatis
Catholic Historiography?"Catholic Historical Review 56 (1975), 169-190.

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136 BRAD S. GREGORY

confessional history, beginning already in the sixteenth century.8Partly (and

understandably)in pursuitof impartiality,most recent historiansof Reformation-
era Christianityhave turnedto theories of religion drawnfrom the modernsocial
sciences (most often sociology, anthropology,or psychology) or the humanities
(sometimes philosophy, and more recently, literarycriticism or culturaltheory),
in an effort to treat all traditionswith even-handed neutrality.Yet at the same
time, however well-intentioned,this move is deeply problematic:the means and
the end are mismatched,most fundamentallybecause the assumptionsembedded
in such theories are almost never impartialor neutralwith respect to religion as
such, however unprejudicedthey might be with respect to any particularreligious
tradition.The result is not a neutralor objective account of what religion really
is, still less a means by which to understandwhat religion means to its believer-
practitioners.Rather,the results yield differentlybiased accounts that reflect the
secularassumptionsunderpinningthe theories.
Confessional history appears in a somewhat different light if we regard its
distinguishing mark not as the imposition of particularreligious beliefs in the
study of religion, but rather,more broadly,as the imposition of undemonstrable
metaphysicalbeliefs, whatever their content, in the practice of that scholarship.
In this conceptualization,the adoption of secular theories that overtly or tacitly
explain religion by reducing it to something else would constitute a form of
confessional history- a secularconfessional history- one thatin importantways
mirrorstraditional,religious confessional history.If such an idea seems strange,
this derives largely from the fact thatthe foundationalbeliefs of the modernsocial
sciences and humanities, notwithstandingthe linguistic turn, postmodernism,
postcolonialism, and other recent intellectual trends, are by now so pervasive
and so taken for granted that they are not even self-consciously regarded as
beliefs at all. Rather,they are implicitly consideredin academicdiscourse as true,
neutraldescriptions of the natureof reality, although this is seldom articulated.
Consider the matter-of-factremarksmade without comment or justification by
the eminentAmericanhistorianRichardWhite in the midst of a recent book, the
very terseness of which seems intended to connote their supposed obviousness:
"I am a historian.I don't believe in transcendence.There is only the everyday."'
The assumptionsbehind such remarksare theologically atheistic,metaphysically
materialist, and culturally relativist, framed by the postulates of the natural
sciences, and historically derived in part from the unresolved doctrinaldisputes
over Christiantruth in early modern Europe. Whereas traditionalconfessional
historians assumed that a particularreligious tradition is true and conducted
their investigation accordingly, secular confessional historians assume-based
ultimatelyon a dogmaticmetaphysicalnaturalism,or on its functionalequivalent,

8. The two most ambitious, opposed interpretationsof the history of Christianitywritten in the
sixteenth century were the so-called Magdeburg Centuries,produced by a team under the direction
of MatthiasFlacius Illyricus in LutheranMagdeburg,which appearedbetween 1559 and 1574, and
the Ecclesiastical Annals of the Catholic Oratorian,CaesarBaronius, which was published in Rome
between 1588 and 1607. See Pontien Polman,L'Elementhistoriquedans la controverserdligieusedu
XVIe sidcle (Gembloux:J. Duculot, 1932), 213-215, 527.
9. RichardWhite, RememberingAhanagran:Storytellingin a Family's Past (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1998), 40.

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 THE OTHERCONFESSIONALHISTORY 137

a thoroughgoing epistemological skepticism about all religious claims- that

no religion is, indeed cannot be, what its believer-practitionersclaim that it is.
As a result and by necessity, as Clifford Geertz has recently put it, "'Religion'
is everyone's favorite dependent variable.""•In both cases, religious and
secular confessional histories depend in a substantive way on undemonstrated
and undemonstrablemetaphysicalbeliefs. To the extent that the modern social
sciences and humanities are framed implicitly by the metaphysical naturalism
of the modern naturalsciences, they leave no room for the reality of the content
of religious claims: in Christianity,for example, content concerning God, Satan,
sin, grace, heaven, hell, revelation,redemption,providence,sanctity,and the rest.
Consequently,spirituality,for example, can only be approachedthroughsecular
psychological categories;sacramentsonly in terms of anthropologicalritualsand
symbols that ostensibly constructand reinforce community identity; sin only in
terms of socially and/orpolitically disapprovedbehaviors that threatenstability
or some other interest. That prayer might really entail relationship with God,
or that sacramentsmight really be channels of grace, or that sin might be an
objective category of actions disapprovedof by God, are notions that modem
social-scientific and cultural-theoreticalapproachesto religion simply reject as
incompatiblewith theirimplicitassumptions.Yet suchconvictions andexperiences
linked to them were integralto early modern Christians'lives, in differentways
and to varying degrees,just as many of these convictions and experiences are for
Christianstoday.This point holds, it seems to me, for traditionssuch as Judaism
and Islam in their respective ways. Put bluntly, the underlying beliefs of the
modem social sciences andhumanitiesaremetaphysicallynaturalistandculturally
relativist, and consequently contend that religion is and can only be a human
construction. Believer-practitionersin traditions such as Christianity,Judaism,
and Islam, by contrastand in differentways, believe in transcendentreality and
divine revelation, and in one sense or another they privilege their respective
understandingsof realitybased on faith, which informstheirworldviews, actions,
and lives. We have in this opposition, it seems to me, the distilled essence of
the post-Enlightenment,rationalistrejectionof the claims of revealed religion as
such, the modem genealogy of which is traceableback at least as far as Spinoza
on the dogmatic side, Hume on the skeptical side. On this view, religion must
be reducible to something social, political, economic, cultural,psychological, or
natural,because by definitionthere is nothing more for it to be.
But is dogmatic naturalisma metaphysicalbelief parallel to religious beliefs,
rather than a demonstrated truth or a neutral description of reality? While
adequatelyto addressthe issue would requirea book (or several), the basic point
for the purposes of the present argumentis clear enough. Any conviction that
precludes in principle the possibilities that transcendent,spiritualreality exists,
that divine revelation is possible, that divinely worked miracles occur or have
occurred,that there is an afterlife, and the like, cannot itself be demonstrateda
posteriori, in our present or in any realistically foreseeable state of knowledge.
10. Clifford Geertz, "The Pinch of Destiny: Religion as Experience, Meaning, Identity, Power,"
in idem, Available Light: AnthropologicalReflections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton:Princeton
University Press, 2000), 179; first publishedin Raritan:A QuarterlyReview 18:3 (1999), 1-19.

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138 BRAD S. GREGORY

To verify such a conviction with respect to miracles, for example, would among
other things requireobservationof all naturaloccurrencesat all times and places,
includingthose in the past- a patentimpossibility.The undeniablyfruitfula priori
assumptionof metaphysicalnaturalismin the naturalsciences is not and cannotbe
a proof thatin fact, for example, no miraculousevents of the sort describedin the
Hebrew Bible or the New Testamenthave ever occurred."Since it is impossible
to verify that none of them occurred,it is possible that some of them might have
occurred.Thereforeto assert that none of them could have occurredis to assert
a metaphysicalbelief about reality, to pass from the postulate to the dogma of
metaphysicalnaturalism.Understandablybutfallaciously,this belief gains strength
from the ongoing, remarkabletechnological successes derived from the findings
of the natural sciences--as if greater mastery and explanation of the material
world could somehow demonstratethe non-existence of spiritualreality,or show
that miracles are impossible in principle. If, for example, the personal God of
traditionalChristianityis real, then all the computerwizardryor biotechnologyin
the world cannotmake God an illusion. Among many academics (althoughmuch
less so, at least in the U.S., outside the academyl2), the belief that miracles are
impossible in principle seems natural,normal, obvious, undeniable--ratherlike
religious beliefs in close-knit, traditionalsocieties. The conviction has an auraof
neutralityand objectivity,as if dogmaticmetaphysicalnaturalismwere somehow
not as much a personal conviction as is dogmatic religion, as if rejection of the
very possibility of transcendentreality were the default position, one obvious to
any intelligentperson.'3
It is an undemonstrablebelief to hold that any religious claim that violates
metaphysicalnaturalismmust be false. Thereforeto adopt a theory or theoretical
hybridpurportingto explain religion in termsdictatedby metaphysicalnaturalism
is to work in a manner analogous to that of a traditional,religious confessional
historian,insofaras one's analysis relies substantivelyon one's own beliefs. In my
experience, even to raise this issue in the setting of secular academia verges on
the bizarre- I am temptedto say "heretical"- so pervasive and deeply ingrained
are the underlyingassumptionsof metaphysicalnaturalism,often coupled with a
robustculturalrelativism,that it challenges. But if we go back a few generations

11. Correlatively,had some of them occurred, this would have no influence whatsoever, as is
sometimes mistakenlyclaimed, on the findings or explanatorypower today of the naturalsciences, or
of inductive reasoning in general. On this point, see, for example, J. Houston, ReportedMiracles: A
Critiqueof Hume (Cambridge,Eng.: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1994), 138-142.
12. A 1989 Galluppoll of Americans' religious views revealed that 82% of those polled (and they
were not simply the uneducated)agreed with the propositionthat "even today, miracles are still per-
formedby the power of God,"and only 6%disagreedcompletely with the proposition.GeorgeGallup,
Jr. and Jim Castelli, The People's Religion: American Faith in the 90's (New York: Macmillan;
London:Collier, 1989), 58, cited in John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinkingthe Historical Jesus,
vol. 2, Mentor, Message, and Miracles (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 520-521. Whateverelse this
finding implies, Meier rightly infers that "the academic creed of 'no modern person can believe in
miracles' should be consigned to the dustbinof empiricallyfalsified hypotheses"(ibid., 521).
13. For those who still believe thatDavid Hume's criticismof miracleson epistemologicalgrounds
comprises the final word on the matter, see Houston, ReportedMiracles, esp. 121-207; C. Stephen
Evans, The Historical Christand the Jesus of Faith: The IncarnationalNarrative as History (Oxford:
ClarendonPress, 1996), 153-156; and more narrowlybut perhapsmore powerfully, David Johnson,
Hume, Holism, and Miracles (Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).

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 THE OTHERCONFESSIONALHISTORY 139

we can find a social scientist-one whose sociology of religion remains highly

influential today--actually asserting the importanceof metaphysicalnaturalism
as the basis for the social sciences in the study of religion. Emile Durkheimdid so
explicitly in TheElementaryForms of Religious Life, firstpublishedin 1912.
Near the end of book one, for example, Durkheimstates that "Surely,it ought
to be a principle [unprincipe] for the science of religions that religion expresses
nothing that is not in nature: There is no science except science of natural
phenomena."14 Or again, in the most famous chapterof the book, he writes that,
"The sensations that the physical world evokes in us cannot, by definition [par
dcfinition], contain anything that goes beyond that world."'5In dismissing the
mindset that accepts the possibility of miracles, Durkheimclearly reveals that he
conceives the social sciences on the model of the naturalsciences:
Althoughthe principleof determinism is firmlyestablishedin the physicalandnatural
sciences,its into
introduction thesocialsciencesbeganonlya centuryago,andits authority
thereis stillcontested.Theideathatsocietiesaresubjectto necessarylawsandconstitute
a realmof naturehas deeplypenetrated only a few minds.It follows thattruemiracles
are thought possible in society. . . . As regards social things, we still have the mind-set of
primitives.

Such people "cling to these illusions that,"Durkheimalleges, "arerepeatedly

contradictedby experience,"because "they have not yet graspedthe need to turn
to the painstakingmethodsof the naturalsciences in orderprogressivelyto sweep
away the darkness."'6In the book's introductionhe compareshis social-scientific
endeavor to the work of a biologist, a physicist, and a doctor. Sounding much
like Freudin The Future of an Illusion, and pointing to Durkheim'sphylogenetic
method of explaining newer and more complex religions by means of older and
simplerones, beginningwith totemismas the simplestof all, Durkheimwrites that
"To understanda delusion [un delire] properly and to be able to apply the most
appropriatetreatment,the doctor needs to know what its point of departurewas.
That event is the more easily detected the nearerto its beginnings the delusion
can be observed.""7
14. Emile Durkheim,The ElementaryForms of Religious Life, transl.KarenE. Fields (New York:
Free Press, 1995), bk. 1, ch. 2, 66 (my emphasis). For the same passage in Durkheim's French, see
idem, Lesformes dldmentairesde la vie religieuse. Le systkmetotimique en Australie, 7th ed. [1912]
(Paris:Presses Universitairesde France, 1985), 98.
15. Durkheim,Forms, bk. 2, ch. 7, 226 (my emphasis); idem, Formes, 321. See also Forms, 419,
where he calls "salvationby faith"a "mereidea," and assertsthat, "In fact, an idea is but one element
of ourselves. How could it confer on us powers that are superiorto those given us in our natural
makeup?As rich in emotive power as an idea may be, it cannot add anythingto our natural vitality;
it can only release emotive forces that are alreadywithin us, neithercreatingnor increasingthem"(my
emphases). I know of few sixteenth-centuryProtestantswho would have concurredthat salvation by
faith was a "mereidea"-- to say nothingof millions of evangelical Protestantstoday-yet Durkheim's
dogmatic metaphysicalviews guaranteethat this is all that it can be.
16. Ibid., bk. 1, ch. 1, 24. For the argumentthat the epistemology of the social sciences cannot in
principle be modeled on that of the naturalsciences, see Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science
and Its Relationship to Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), with specific criti-
cism of Durkheimat 23-24, 109. On the natureof generalizationsin the social sciences and, contra
Durkheim,their "absenceof the discovery of any law-like generalizationswhatsoever,"see Alasdair
MacIntyre,After Virtue:A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1984), 88-108, quotationon 88.
17. Durkheim,Forms, 6; idem, Formes, 10. For the analogy to biology, see Durkheim,Forms, 3;
for the analogy to physics, see ibid., 8.

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140 BRAD S. GREGORY

Durkheim's belief in metaphysical naturalismis foundational for his entire

endeavor.Because "by definition"therecan be nothingbeyond the naturalworld,
all religious claims that refer to anythingtranscendent,spiritual,or supernatural
must be false consideredas such, and theirreferentsmust be reducibleto natural
phenomena. Religion, grounded in social experience and so in what Durkheim
repeatedly calls "the real," is not and cannot be what believers think it is, nor
can they be consulted for a definition or account of religion, even their own.18
What religion means to religious people is irrelevant to grasping its essence.
Small wonder, since when considered straightforwardly,to follow Durkheim's
own characterization,religious claims belong to a "delusion"of primitive-minded
people "cling[ing]"to "illusions" and still in pre-scientific"darkness."What is
perhaps Durkheim's most famous assertion is consistent with this assessment:
when religious people thinkthatthey areworshippingGod or gods, they arereally
conserving society and renewing the supra-individualsocial experience whence
religious beliefs had their genesis. Durkheim'sconstantlyrecurringreferencesto
"the real"refer necessarily to the natural,materialworld, of which society is the
"highest expression. The social realm is a naturalrealm that differs from others
only in its greatercomplexity."19
We can see precisely where Durkheimmoves from the impressive findingsof
the naturalsciences based upon the postulate of naturalism(and determinism),to
the specious claim thatnaturalismis a demonstratedtruth.He refersto the modern
"awarenessthatthereis a naturalorderofthings, in otherwords,thatthephenomena
of the universe are internally linked accordingto necessary relationshipscalled
laws." He continues:"Now, the idea of universaldeterminismis of recent origin;
even the greatestthinkersof classical antiquitydid not achieve full awarenessof
it. Thatidea is territorywon by the empiricalsciences; it is thepostulate [postulat]
on which they rest and which their advancementhas proved."20 This last claim
is mistaken;the advancementof the sciences cannot in principle "demonstrate"
that metaphysicalnaturalismis more than a postulate,nor can presentexperience
possibly "contradict"a mindset that acknowledges the possibility of miracles
wroughtby God. Clearly Durkheimbelieved that this was so, and he sought to
explain religion as though his dogma were an indisputabletruth. In doing so,
however,he devisedhis single-genus,genealogicaltheoryof religionnot as a neutral
but as a confessional social scientist, an investigatorcommittedto metaphysical
naturalism.The natureof realityitself is at stakein the differencebetweenreligious
and secularworldviews.In treatinghis own foundationalbelief as thoughit werean
undeniabletruth-in referringconstantlyto "thereal"as thoughit were a corollary

18. "Well before the science of religions institutedits methodicalcomparisons,men had to create
theirown idea of what religion is .... But since these notions are formedunmethodically,in the com-
ings and goings of life, they cannot be relied on and must be rigorouslykept to one side in the exami-
nation that follows. It is not our preconceptions,passions, or habits that must be consulted for the
elements of the definition we need; definition is to be sought from reality itself" (Durkheim,Forms,
21-22). By definition, accordingto Durkheim,this reality is strictly naturalisticand materialist.
19. Ibid., 17.
20. Ibid., 24 (my emphasison final phrase);idem,Formes, 36. The entirefinal sentence in French:
"C'est [cette notion du ddterminismeuniversel] une conqubtedes sciences positives; c'est le postulat
sur lequel elles reposentet qu'elles ont ddmontr6par leurs progrbs."

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 THE OTHERCONFESSIONALHISTORY 141

of metaphysicalnaturalismand a settled issue -Durkheim not only begs a central

question,but seems oblivious to the fact.
Durkheim'sdubious insistence on metaphysicalnaturalismneed not be taken
to imply, of course, that the entiretyof his sociology of religion is without value.
His emphasis on the social characterof religion, one reinforcedby so many other
sociologists, has been a major contributionto the study of religion in the past
century, one that has been taken up fruitfully by many historians of religion.
This social emphasis has helped to breathelife into religion as lived experience
among concrete human beings, broadening and enlivening it beyond narrow
ecclesiastical histories of institutionsand doctrines. Put bluntly, in the scholarly
study of Christianity,Durkheim'semphasis helped to change churchhistory into
the social history of religion. Yet to say that religion is deeply social in no way
implies that all its beliefs and practicesmust be reducibleto social life within the
termsdictatedby metaphysicalnaturalism.Whateverelse the latterclaim entails,
it is guaranteedto prevent one from understandingreligion on the terms of its
practitioners.
Durkheimlooked to the naturalsciences as a model for the study of religion,
and was explicit aboutthe foundationalimportanceof metaphysicalnaturalismin
the endeavor.Historiansof religion today (at least among those who study early
modernChristianity)rarelymentioneitherpoint, althoughthe implicit assumption
of metaphysicalnaturalism--perhapsmore often in the form of epistemological
skepticism about all religious claims, rather than confident rejection of the
possibility that some might be true-is extremely widespread, indeed a virtual
sine qua non in the history of religion, perhaps because the only alternativeis
perceived to be apologetic, confessional history. This makes for a great irony:
metaphysicalnaturalismor at least committedskepticismaboutreligious claims is
widely accepted as a working assumption,yet the social sciences and humanities
concerned with religion arguably have never distanced themselves further
from the natural sciences.21Scholars of religion today do not avow naturalist
metaphysicalcommitmentsbecause presumablythey do not need to. Such beliefs
constitute part of the assumed backgroundconvictions of secular academia, in
which ostensibly it is simply "obvious"thatclaims aboutmiracles or the afterlife,
for example, are "notto be taken seriously."Yet assumptionsare no less operative
for being unexpressed, and more recent theories of religion with an implicit
commitmentto metaphysicalnaturalismareultimatelyno less reductionistthanis

21. As Geertzputs it with characteristicpanache,"theutopianisminducedby a misconceived view

of pre-twentieth-centuryphysics ... that was imported into the human sciences has led not to the
gates of paradigm-land,but to a great deal of wasted motion and high proclamation"(Geertz, "The
State of the Art: 'Local Knowledge' and Its Limits," in Available Light, 136-137; first published as
"'Local Knowledge' and Its Limits," in The Yale Journal of Criticism5 [1993], 129-135). I exclude
considerationof those who aspire to explain religion via fields such as sociobiology or evolutionary
psychology, since such explanationshave had little if any influence on historiansof medieval, early
modern, or modern Christianity,the fields with which I am most familiar. Some systematic soci-
ologists of religion, however, have sought to reduce religion to aspects of human beings' biological
constitution. See, for example, the neo-Feuerbachian,projectionisttheory of religion conceived as
partof human"externalization,"which in his early work Peter Berger claimed was groundedin "the
biological constitutionof man" (Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of
Religion (1967) [New York: Anchor Books, 1990], 4). See also ibid., 5, 8, 19.

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 142 BRAD S. GREGORY

Durkheim'ssociology of religion. This point can perhapsbe made most strongly

by turningto the discipline often considered the least reductionistin the study of
religion, namely social and/orculturalanthropology.The idea is widespreadthat
the careful applicationof anthropologicalmethodsand categoriesis a vital tool in
the intellectualsatchel of the historianof religion.22And in recent decades within
the domain of social and culturalanthropology,perhapsno approachto religion
has been seen as more useful, more sympatheticto believer-practitionerson their
own terms,thanCliffordGeertz'sbroadinterpretivenotion of "thickdescription,"
which he particularizedfor the study of religion in his famous article, "Religion
as a CulturalSystem."
In this article, Geertz's definition of religion is as follows: "a religion is (1) a
system of symbols which acts to (2) establishpowerful,pervasive,andlong-lasting
moods and motivationsin men by (3) formulatingconceptions of a general order
of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality
that (5) the moods and motivationsseem uniquely realistic."23 At base, according
to Geertz, a religion is "a system of symbols." Fundamentalto his definition
is his understandingof symbols, by which he means "any object, act, event,
quality, or relationwhich serves as a vehicle for a conception,"that is, "tangible
formulationsof notions, abstractionsfrom experience fixed in perceptibleforms,
concrete embodiments of ideas, attitudes, judgments, longings, or beliefs."24
Conspicuously lacking here, and symptomatic of an underlying metaphysical
naturalism,is anything beyond strictly human conceptions and motivations to
which the symbols refer, anythingbeyond the naturalworld that they symbolize.
Regardless of the period in question, it is hard to imagine that any believing
Christian(or Jew, or Muslim) would acknowledgeGeertz'simplicit startingpoint:
that religion-all religion-is merely one or another"system of symbols,"rather
than, for example, a response to God that makes use of symbols. This distinction
parallels the one between religion as reducible to social relations, as Durkheim
would have it, and religion as a deeply social phenomenon.According to Geertz
and other culturalanthropologistswho take a similar approach,religion begins
and ends with human beings; according to religious believer-practitionersin
Christianity,Judaism,and Islam, it begins with God, with a divine initiative that
solicits a humanresponse and relationship.Note that here, unlike in Durkheim,
there is no sharp insistence on avoiding "illusions," no strong declaration of
metaphysicalnaturalism.25 Why beat a horse that is purportedlydead? Durkheim
was writing in 1912, Geertz in 1973. Instead,the startingpoint tacitly assumes a
metaphysicalnaturalismthatreduces the spiritualto the symbolic and religion to

22. For a confirmationof the appeal of anthropologicaltheories of ritual to medieval historians

as well as a trenchantcritique of the applicationof such theories to medieval rites and practices, see
Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory
(Princeton:PrincetonUniversity Press, 2001), esp. 203-261.
23. Geertz, "Religion as a CulturalSystem," in idem, The Interpretationof Cultures(New York:
Basic Books, 1973), 90.
24. Ibid., 91.
25. On two occasions, however, one of which concerns the question of divine interventionin the
world, the otherthe truthvalue of religious claims, Geertzrefersto "thebusiness of the scientist"and
to "the self-imposed limitationsof the scientific perspective"(ibid., 112, 123).

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 THE OTHERCONFESSIONALHISTORY 143

culture.In certainpassages, Geertz seems (whether intentionallyor not) to have

replaced "God"with "symbol":He writes that "Mandepends upon symbols and
symbol systems with a dependence so great as to be decisive for his creatural
viability" (compare with this version, which many believer-practitionerswould
acknowledge: "Man depends upon God with a dependence so great as to be
decisive for his creaturalviability").26The rest of Geertz's definition,too, implies
thatreligion is somethingvery differentfrom what religious practitionersconsider
it to be: its "conceptions of a general order of existence" are "cloth[ed]"with
"an aura of factuality"--ratherthan being, for example, articulationsof the way
things really are. The "moods"and "motivations"it establishes "seem uniquely
realistic"-but in fact, the logic of Geertz's grammarimplies, are not. However
superficiallycongenial to understandingreligion, the implicationof Geertz'sview
seems to be thatto analyze religion properlyentails strippingaway its impressive,
powerful aura, which enables one to see both what it really is and how it does
what it does. Geertz's reductionismis not as crass as that of Freud or Marx, nor
as explicit as in Durkheim,but in the end it reduces religion to culturewithin the
frameworkof a naturalistmetaphysics.
Historians whose analyses of religion depend upon such views are therefore
writing a form of secular confessional history, and one that inevitably distorts
the views of religious believer-practitioners.If one contends, for example, that,
"In the late Middle Ages, Satan was the metaphoriccategory into which all but
a few theologians deposited misfortuneand human ills of every kind,"then one
will miss and misconstruethe terrifyingreality of Satanto those for whom he was
(and remains) a terrifyingreality.27So too, if the entire premise of a study on the
Eucharistin the late Middle Ages is that it was "constructedas a symbol," and
that religion is reducible to culture and "all culture, all meaning can usefully be
studiedas a languagethroughits salient symbols,"then one will necessarily miss
the meaning of the transubstantiated host for late-medievalpeople high and low,
clergy and laity, according to whom the Eucharistwas not merely symbolic.28
Or again, if one claims that fifteenth- and sixteenth-centuryChristians"all acted
out their lives in an illusory, enchantedworld" which "was not metaphysicalas
they imagined,"and that they were people who mistakenlybelieved that "behind
the individual actions . . . was God's great plan of history for the salvation and
damnationof souls,"then one is writingas a secularconfessional historian.29That
religion is always expressed in culturalforms is not the same thing as claiming
thatreligion is (and must be) reducibleto culture.

26. Ibid., 99. See also this sentence:"Forthose able to embracethem [God], and for so long as they
are able to embracethem [God], religious symbols [God] provide[s] a cosmic guaranteenot only for
theirability to comprehendthe world, but also, comprehendingit, to give a precision to theirfeeling, a
definitionto their emotions which enables them, morosely or joyfully, grimly or cavalierly, to endure
it" (ibid., 104 [my interpolations]).
27. Susan Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany
(Londonand New York: Routledge, 1996), 70.
28. Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, Eng.:
CambridgeUniversity Press, 1991), 1-11, quotationson 1, 6.
29. Richard Wunderli, Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1992), 149.

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144 BRAD S. GREGORY

At the same time, without social and culturalanthropologyit may be doubted

whether interest in medieval and early modem Christianitywould be anywhere
nearas widespreadas it is andhas been in recentdecades. Like sociology, cultural
anthropologyhas helped to createthe history of religion out of traditionalchurch
history,providingat least some inkling of how ordinarypremodernpeople, most
of whom were illiterate,might have experiencedthe religion that they practiced.
Yet one need not assume metaphysicalnaturalismin order to analyze religion's
cultural expressions and meanings for those whose expressions and meanings
they were; indeed, such an assumptionprecludes understandingthose meanings
on practitioners'terms.
The dominant explanation of early modem Christianityin recent decades
regardsit fundamentallyas a means of political controland social discipline. This
view has been inspiredpartlyby GerhardOestreich's scholarshipon the revival
of political neo-Stoicism in the late sixteenth century,but more pervasively and
diffusely by Michel Foucault's neo-Nietzschean ideas about power, knowledge,
discipline, and control.30 According to this view historians of religion should
employ a hermeneuticsof suspicion as their chief interpretiveassumption,seeing
self-professedreligiousmotivationsas anideology forthe exerciseof power andthe
assertionof self-interest.All of the sermons,the missionaryefforts, the regulation
and surveillance, the state supportof churches, and the emphasis on obedience
in the Reformation era should be understood as means by which authorities
sought incrementallyto discipline and control a relatively unruly late-medieval
populationthroughconfessionalization.Unlike Durkheimor Geertz,Foucaultdid
not propoundan explanatorytheory of religion per se, althoughthere can be no
questionaboutthe metaphysicalnaturalismunderpinninghis thought,the implicit
denial of any sortof religious transcendence,meaning,or mystery.One finds overt
tracesof Foucault'sbeliefs relativeto religion, as when he refersto the traditional
understandingof the soul as "theillusion of the theologians"and,turningPlato on
his head, assertsthat, "the soul [as createdby power relations]is the prison of the
body.""31 But as with Geertz, Foucault simply assumes metaphysicalnaturalism,
ratherlike the Frenchpolitical theoristMarcelGauchet,who refersin Foucauldian
fashion to "our own flesh" as "the archetypalgiven."32At the same time, few
historians of Reformation-eraChristianity appropriateFoucauldian ideas in a
narrow or direct fashion, and so secular confessional assumptionsare typically
buriedstill further.For example, the blatantlyreductionistexplanationof religion

30. For Oestreich, see his Geist und Gestalt des friihmodernen Staates (Berlin: Duncker and
Humblot, 1969), transl. as Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, ed. Brigitta Oestreich and H.
G. Koeningsberger,transl.David McLintock(Cambridge,Eng.: CambridgeUniversityPress, 1982).
See also, more recently, idem, AntikerGeist und modernerStaat bei Justus Lipsius(1547-1606): Der
Neustoizismusals politische Bewegung, ed. Nicolette Mout (Gottingen:Vendenhoeckand Ruprecht,
1989).
31. Michel Foucault,Discipline and Punish: TheBirth of the Prison, transl.Alan Sheridan[1977]
(Harmondsworth,Eng.: Penguin, 1985), 30. One of the best orientations to Foucault's thought,
which makes clear his rejection of any truthclaims considered apartfrom the power relations that
ostensibly constitute them, remains HubertL. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond
Structuralismand Hermeneutics(Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1983).
32. Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantmentof the World:A Political History of Religion, transl.
Oscar Burge (Princeton:PrincetonUniversity Press, 1997), 96-97.

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 THE OTHERCONFESSIONALHISTORY 145

in JosephKoerner'srecent studyof Lutheranimages in the Reformationera is rife

with Foucauldiannotions, but does not refer explicitly to Foucault.33
It would be foolish to deny that religion can be, often has been, and continues
to be cynically manipulatedfor self-serving purposes. But this is a matterto be
shown on the basis of evidence, not assumed as a matterof course about entire
epochs, religious traditions,or religion as a whole. If one writes from a position
based on beliefs in metaphysicalnaturalismor thoroughgoingskepticism about
the claims of religion as such, however, then blanket claims about religion as a
tool of power and dominationare much more likely, simply because the referents
of religious belief are denied from the outset. Once the claims of revealedreligion
are rejected a priori, it is obviously impossible for any Christianever really to
have experienced, for example, the "power of the Holy Spirit."Power in human
relationshipsand institutions,on the other hand, seems readily comprehensible
andvisible, as nearas the most recentfaculty meeting or hiringdecision, andmany
of the actions of early modem Christianmagistratesand ministerscan plausibly
be interpretedas attemptsto discipline people throughan ideology of obedience
cast in religious language.34Such plausibility is reinforced by a besieged but
still dominantand mostly approvedliberationistnarrativeof secular modernity,
in which early modem individuals and groups graduallyfreed themselves from
the assumptions of hierarchy and the demands of tradition. In this account,
traditionalreligion and the societies that it informed, with their dogmas, morals,
prescriptions,and sanctions, comprised perhapsthe single greatest impediment
to the establishment of the individual freedoms embedded in the institutions
and ideologies of Westernmodernity.Men (and later, women) became modern,
liberated,autonomous,secularindividuals(a good thing)by castingoff premodern,
restrictive,authority-bound,religious participationin traditionalcommunities (a
bad thing). Hence the politically intelligible tendency to ascribe self-professed
early modem religious beliefs to base motives wherever it offends modern or
postmodernsecular sensibilities.
The mere fact that early modem Catholics and Protestantsbelieved and did
things noxious to currentsecularsensibilities, however, cannot in itself somehow
rendertheirmotivationscynical insteadof sincere, or secularratherthanreligious.
Religious convictions deemed objectionable or strange by whatever criteria, in
the past or present,do not therebylose their religious character.Individuallyand
autobiographically,I first learned this as an outsider among Mormons in Utah;
widely anddisturbingly,it has been confirmedin the U.S. beginningon September
11, 2001. The rejection by militant Islamist extremists of modern Western
33. See, for example, phrases such as "positioning bodies in a social space," "the 'order word'
that makes persons into governed subjects,"and the "panopticalideal" (Koerner,Reformationof the
Image, 379, 401, 421, and more generally, 377-440). Elsewhere, Koerneris explicit about his belief
that Durkheim's sociology of religion is true: "Although its beliefs and rituals seem to concern a
spiritual order, under scrutiny religion in fact serves to place individuals within their natural and
social worlds, and to cause them to accept those worlds to be the true ones .... functional analysis
can process all expressions with equal ease" (ibid., 419-420 [my emphasis]).
34. It should be remembered,however, that in early modern Christianity,pastors and priests did
not exempt themselves from the same strictures,and often held themselves to a more rigorous stan-
dardthanthose expected of the laity, a point made well by Thomas N. Tentler,Sin and Confessionon
the Eve of the Reformation(Princeton:PrincetonUniversity Press, 1977), xx, 364.

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146 BRAD S. GREGORY

conceptions of the distinction between religion and politics, or their refusal to

recognize where Westernersdraw the line between private and public spheres,
does not somehow alter their religious motivations. Deploring their values or
consideringthem pervertersof Islam does not maketheiractions"political"rather
than religious. Rather,it demonstratesthat they have radically different beliefs
about the justifiable expression of religion in the world. Whether Reformation-
era Christianitywas fundamentallyan exercise in social-control ideology cast
in religious terms, or whether instead concerns about authority,obedience, and
orthodoxywere integralexpressions of religion itself as understoodby those with
responsibilityfor the care of souls, is an open question that shouldbe approached
on a case-by-case basis and, as with all historicalquestions,within the limitations
imposed by the surviving evidence. Recourse to theories of religion that rely on
metaphysical naturalismcannot settle the question, but will ratheryield some
form of secular confessional history. Such theories of religion cannot substitute
or compensate for the paucity or thinness of sources, nor can one simply infer
meanings and motivations from past prescriptionsand behaviors. In the case of
my graduatestudentfriendwho wiped up the spilled drink,the interpretationthat
he was actingout of commitmentto the social contractwas mistaken,even though
it was consistent with his actions.
To sum up the argumentthus far: a secular bias proceeds from explanatory
theories of religion that assume metaphysical naturalism or epistemological
skepticismaboutreligious claims. In the historyof religion, a substantivereliance
on such theories yields a secularconfessional history.This goes unrecognizedto
the extent that such metaphysicalbeliefs are widely but wrongly consideredto be
undeniabletruths.These beliefs necessarily distort the characterof religion and
what it means for religious people: "No religion can be what its adherentsallege"
is a less than promising maxim on the basis of which to penetratethe character
of religious belief and practice, yet such a maxim is implicit in metaphysical
naturalism.Consequently,if one seeks to "get"religion on the terms of religious
people, one must avoid imposing secularbeliefs on them.
Where does this leave us? A reactionaryresumption of traditional confes-
sional history is not the only alternative, nor is it desirable. There is a third
way, one alreadyemployed by numerousscholars in one form or another.35The
point is not to impose any metaphysicalbeliefs or moraljudgments on religious
35. A few examples of such an approachin my own field might include, for magisterialProtes-
tantism, Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement [1967] (Oxford: ClarendonPress,
1990), and Heiko A. Oberman,Luther: Man between God and the Devil, transl. Eileen Walliser-
Schwarzbart(New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 1989); for early modernCatholicism,
John W. O'Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), and
Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity, and History in TridentineItaly: Pietro Maria Campi and the
Preservationof the Particular (Cambridge,Eng.: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1995); and for the rad-
ical Reformation,JamesM. Stayer, The GermanPeasants' Warand AnabaptistCommunityof Goods
(Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991), and Werner Packull, Hutterite Beginnings:
CommunitarianExperimentsduring the Reformation(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1995). If I have done something new, it is to show that an individual scholar can carry out a post-
confessional, non-reductionistapproachconsistently across the three main traditionsof early modern
Christianity,namely magisterial Protestantism,radical Protestantism,and Roman Catholicism. See
Brad S. Gregory,Salvationat Stake: ChristianMartyrdomin Early ModernEurope(Cambridge,MA
and London:HarvardUniversity Press, 1999).

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 THE OTHERCONFESSIONALHISTORY 147

people, for the purposes of understandingthem.36To reject the partisanreligious

convictions of traditionalconfessional history does not force one to adopt the
metaphysical naturalismof secular confessional history. Instead, an approach
that is metaphysicallyneutralneither privileges a particulartraditionor specific
religious claims, nor does it imply that scholarsof religion must conductresearch
as if no religious claims could be true. It seems that few central contentions in
Judaism,Christianity,or Islam--for example, the Jews are God's chosen people,
Jesus is the incarnationof God, Mohammed is Allah's greatest prophet-could
be proven to be false. Given the fact that respective adherentsof these traditions
believe such things (pace Koerner)and incorporatethem into their lives, that to
religious people "belief matters,and mattersterribly,"as Geertz has recently put
it, it seems incumbenton scholarsof religion to proceed as if the religious beliefs
of their subjects might be true, a possibility that a metaphysicallyneutralmeth-
odology leaves open.37On what basis could one justify the contrary,other than
dogmatism? "Thick description"is a good phrase for the objective of such an
approach--only it needs to be thickerthan thatpermittedby Geertz's metaphysi-
cally reductionistassumptions.
On this view, the most importantprerequisitefor analyzingreligion consists in
seeing that one's own beliefs, regardlessof their content, are simply and literally
irrelevantto understandingthe people whom one studies. At a time when some
would construeall scholarshipas displaced autobiography,many regardthe idea
of bracketingone's own convictions as a naive chimera. While such bracketing
might well be impossible to realize perfectly, those who have had the experience
of self-consciouslyrestrainingtheirown convictions know thatit is not something
of which scholars are constitutionallyincapable.Imperfectself-restraintis better
than none. To paraphrasethe economist Robert Solow: just because a perfectly
aseptic environmentis impossible does not mean that one shouldconduct surgery
in a sewer.38The key distinctionto be made is not between purportedlyneutral,
sophisticated,critical secular views and biased, naive, uncriticalreligious ones,
but ratherbetween our convictionsand assumptions,whateverthey are, and those
of the people we want to understand.The first prerequisiteis one of the most dif-
ficult: we must be willing to set aside our own beliefs - aboutthe natureof reality,
abouthumanpriorities,aboutmorality--in orderto try to understandthem.
The rejection of reductionisttheory does not imply a "naive positivism," as
though we are intellectuallyrudderlesswithoutthe claims of modem or postmod-
em thinkers,and so condemned to read unthinkinglythroughour sources. This
is simply not the case. The understandingof religion should startnot with reduc-
tionist theories that assume the necessarily illusory characterof the subject mat-
ter, but with questions about what we want to know. And the umbrellaquestion,

36. This does not mean that one cannot ask questions aboutthe truthof religious claims made by a
given individual,group, or tradition,or that one cannot raise moral questions about religious believ-
ers or the humanpast, but only that such questions are distinct and should be kept separatefrom the
attemptto understandreligious believers.
37. Geertz, "Pinchof Destiny," in idem, Available Light, 179.
38. Solow is referred to by Geertz in "Thick Description: Toward an InterpretiveTheory of
Culture,"in idem, Interpretationof Cultures, 30.

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148 BRAD S. GREGORY

"Whatdid it mean to them?"precludes the use of reductionisttheory, however

the question is particularizedin specific inquiries.
One great advantageof the guiding question, "Whatdid it mean to them?"is
that in principle, one can apply it to anyone and everyone in the past, regardless
of religious tradition,social status, political standing, educationallevel, gender,
degree of devotion, or any other variable, without favoring some individuals or
groupsmore thanothers.Because it forces one not to indulgebut to restrainone's
own sympathies(whetheratheistic or religious, Christianor Jewish, neo-Marxist
or conservative, feminist or anti-feminist),it points the way to a genuinely non-
reductionist history of religious traditions, something that cannot be achieved
throughconfessional history, whetherin a traditionalreligious or a reductionist
secularform. The challenge of understandingpeople on theirown terms remains
constantregardlessof whom we are studying,includingthe membersof mutually
antagonisticgroups-Jews and Christiansin the late first century, for example,
or medieval Iberian Muslims and Christians,or central Europeanpeasants and
those who repressedthem in 1525, Mormons and their enemies in the late nine-
teenth century,Muslims and Hindus in northernIndia today. Because it remains
self-consciously neutralin its metaphysicalassumptions,such a projectentails no
judgment about the truthof the beliefs or the morality of the behaviors of those
studied.In the first instanceit simply seeks to know, as accuratelyand completely
as possible, what those beliefs and behaviors were, what they meant to their
protagonists,and how they were embeddedin their lived contexts.39Needless to
say, to understandreligion means to contextualize it as fully as possible, not to
create for it an unrealinsularity,as if it were untouchedby the rest of life. Such
contextualizationis part and parcel of "what it means to them"-for religious
people did not and do not separatereligion from their familial relationships,their
institutionalparticipations,or their social interactions,any more than these were
and are hived off from religion.
The point, the payoff of antireductionism,lies simply in this: to know, as
nearly as we can given the limitationsof our sources and the reachof our analyti-
cal and imaginativepowers, what religion is and means to those who practiceit.
Would they, whoever they are, recognize themselves in what we say aboutthem?
Pursuedsystematically,this questionwill yield analyses of religion very different
from those seen throughthe lenses of modem or postmoderntheories of religion.
It might enable us to grasp why, for example, in the Reformationera, correct
exegesis and true doctrineand properworshipmatteredso much to their protago-
nists, ratherthan renderingtheir religion accessible at the expense of making it
seem absurdor contemptible.Indeed, who would argue over "systems of sym-

39. James Boyd White contends that this entertainmentof beliefs that we ourselves neithershare
nor can imagine ourselves accepting is a form of "patronization,"but this seems unduly negative.
Indeed, it is simply false in the case of converts who originally could not imagine accepting beliefs
that they later came to embrace. It is an intellectual and imaginative challenge to try to understand
what one might still, in the end, individually reject and explain according to one's own beliefs.
Attemptingto understandbeliefs and practices that one does not share, and to write about them such
that one's depictions would be recognized among those about whom one is writing, seems far less
patronizingor condescending than does writing about them based on reductionisttheories. White,
"How Should We Talk?," 1, 8, 12.

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 THE OTHERCONFESSIONALHISTORY 149

bols" or "culturalconstructions"for decades, even centuries,on end? Who would

endure hardship,persecution, even death for them? What would have been the
point then? What would be the point now? In recognizing that reductionistmod-
em and postmodernbeliefs no less than traditionalreligious partisanshipinhibit
understanding,one attemptsto correctwhat E. P. Thompsonfamously called "the
enormous condescension of posterity"40--notto mention the enormous conde-
scension of contemporariesin the study of present-dayreligious believers.
An antireductionist,"thickerdescription"of the religion of individuals within
communitieswithin traditionsdoes not simply leave us with a static snapshotof
believers who believe what they believe and do what they do. Paradoxically,it
provides the foundationfor explaining (and here I do mean explaining) change
over time, at once the central and the most difficult challenge that historians
face. By reconstructingwith sympathy and sensitivity everyone's beliefs and
behaviors,within and across traditions,one discloses the ways in which disagree-
ment has been a fundamentalmotor in human history. It need not be religious
disagreement--the same principle can be extended to beliefs and behaviors in
the broadestsense - althoughthe history of humancivilizations, from the ancient
world to the Middle East at this very moment, makes clear how centralreligious
disagreementand conflict have been for processes of historical change. In the
Reformationera, intractable,violent disagreementsover Christiantruth were a
leading factor in fostering, unintentionallyand over the longue duree, a Western
world dominatedby secular institutionsand beliefs. Ironically, especially in the
last century,some of those secularbeliefs have become so embeddedin the very
endeavor to explain religion that they themselves are now widely but wrongly
regarded as neutral, self-evident truths about reality. A critical self-awareness
should lead us to acknowledgethis fact and to move beyond secularconfessional
history in the study of religion.

Universityof Notre Dame

40. E. P. Thompson,TheMakingof the English WorkingClass [1963] (New York:Vintage, 1966),

12. It would be hardto exempt Thompsonfrom the charge, however, with respect to late eighteenth-
and early nineteenth-centuryMethodism,to which he referredno less famously as "a ritualisedform
of psychic masturbation"(ibid., 368).

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